Recurse Center Week 9

Getting back on track this week is going pretty well, but I’m also a bit overwhelmed that I only have 3 weeks left before my batch disbands!

Monday

This week R0ml was in residence. He’s quite computer-folk/internet-famous and a fellow Recurser took some notes; these aren’t a narrative, but the book references are interesting. My Monday mostly consisted of getting to RC late in the day (*fist-shake* taxes!!) and catching up with folk before going to the talk.

In essence, R0ml’s argument is that the newest age of computing is the one where reliability is what matters (the first ages being efficiency (computers are expensive! don’t waste them!) and adoption (and you get a computer, and you get a computer …) respectively).

In a world where reliability is what we care about [r0ml’s argument is that] immutability is supreme. We don’t go around updating and mutating systems, we have giant logs from which we can derive “truths” about state. It was an interesting talk, and a very strong viewpoint.

Tuesday

I worked on writing my Scheme in Haskell, and worked through some of the exercises in a tri-pair which was really fun. I worked on that most of the day, and then met up with a friend for dinner, feeling frustrated that there aren’t enough hours in the day to program [and get the sleep I want] 🙂

Wednesday

On Wednesday, my idea for the next project to work on started really solidifying, which involved some research into implementation paths, including Bluetooth networks, and I wrote a quick ChromeApp to explore its Bluetooth capabilities (it literally only does that, and not really, so no publishing). Spoilers: I will not be using Bluetooth! I also spent some time prepping for NorfolkJS next week, and I’m super excited to talk about streams!

Thursday

Lots of brainstorming about the project, and now I have a path forward (ish) after lots of good chats with people. I also went to a session on Docker without Docker, and what I’d call “the Scheme support group,” because wow, that book ended up being a lot harder than I expected. I may be abandoning that effort, especially if I latch on to the new project.

Thoughts

I’m working a little bit today (Friday) to get this app started, and hopefully it gives me something to work on for a bit!